The Blue Hackle (42 page)

“I could do with a cuppa.” Alasdair guided
the car into the hotel’s parking area.

Within minutes they were seated in the warm,
slightly steamy, conservatory, tucking into plates of fragrant
curried chicken and rice that were hot in more than one meaning of
the word.

Spices and sweet, milky tea—Jean’s stomach
relaxed a bit, even if her brain still hurt. She gazed past several
hanging ferns interspersed with hanging Christmas cards and through
the plate-glass window, feeling as though she was on display in a
department store as little match girls peered in from the cold . .
.

She sat up so abruptly her spine bounced off
the chair spindles. Out of the shop just across the road walked a
familiar figure, a slender young man in a camouflage coat and a
bonnet sporting a wilted red hackle. “Alasdair . . .”

“I see him.” Alasdair already had the phone
in his hand.

Colin’s ravaged face looked right and left.
But he didn’t hurry across the road. He turned back to the door of
the shop.

Between a swinging ice cream sign and a
newspaper rack glided a lissome figure in a lilac tweed coat. Once
again Diana’s golden hair was partially concealed by a colorful
scarf. Once again she wasn’t fooling anyone—the driver of a passing
van leaned on his horn in approval. Her glare after him should have
caused all four tires to go flat. Whether Colin glared, Jean
couldn’t tell. He handed Diana down the steps of the shop as though
he was handing the Queen herself from her fairy-tale coach.

“Thomson,” Alasdair said into his phone.
“Where are you? Good. Colin Urquhart’s in Dunvegan, with Diana
MacDonald at the wee shop across from the MacLeod Arms Hotel . . .
aye. Just now.”

Colin wasn’t acting like a fugitive. Instead
of slinking away—
you didn’t see me, I wasn’t here
—he stood
on the sidewalk talking to Diana. Jean tried to interpret their
body language, the tight gestures, the tense stances, the way
Diana’s gloved hand jiggled a plastic bag against her leg. They
weren’t exactly exchanging recipes.

Thrusting the phone into his pocket, Alasdair
headed for the door. Jean leaped to her feet. An orange-striped
all-terrain vehicle spun around the corner and skidded to a stop.
Colin whirled, Diana extended her hand, Thomson jumped out of his
car. Colin whirled the other way, saw Alasdair sprinting across the
road toward him, and stopped. He didn’t raise his hands in
surrender, but made more of a blessing-the-multitudes
gesticulation, hands out, palms down.

Jean only realized that she, too, had bolted
out of the hotel when a voice said in her ear, “Excuse me, madam,
you’ve not settled for your meals.”

“Oh.” Jean looked around to see the
proprietor, a dark green apron wrapped around his ample midsection,
his coloring revealing that he not only came from south of
Hadrian’s Wall but also from east of the Bosporus. She reached into
her bag. “Sorry.”

Alasdair pretty much picked up Colin and
Diana by the scruffs of their necks and dragged them toward the
hotel. Thomson vaulted back into his car and ran it into a parking
place, then beat Alasdair and his captives to the door.

Sizing up the situation, the proprietor
handed Jean back her twenty-pound note, scooted another table up to
the one where they’d been sitting and added chairs. “Tea, is it?
Sandwiches? Right you are.” The other patrons went back to their
meals, pretending nothing had happened.

Alasdair seated Diana and Colin with their
faces toward the window, the light revealing their expressions. Her
cheeks were more than rosy, they were the color of ripe cherries,
more from embarrassment than from the cold, Jean estimated. Colin’s
blue eye was less the color of cornflowers than of the Atlantic
shipping lanes far from land. “I was an idiot to go running,” he
said.

“Aye, you were that,” said Alasdair. “And
you, Diana, did you let him in through the cloak room after Thomson
and Nicolson lost him? He did not leave the house wearing his coat
and bonnet.”

Thomson laid a file folder on the table, then
quickly moved it aside as the proprietor distributed metal pitchers
and ceramic teacups. As soon as he’d retired out of earshot, Diana
set her single, sculpted chin the way Fergie had set one of his
flaccid ones that morning. “Yes, I helped him. He didn’t kill Greg.
Give me one reason for him to have killed Greg.”

Alasdair did just that. “If you and Fergie
sold up and moved away, then he’d lose you, eh?”

“What?” Diana exclaimed.

Biting her tongue, Jean busied herself
pouring tea. Not one face was softened by the steam wavering above
the cups. “Was Greg offering to invest in Dunasheen?” Alasdair
asked. “Was he offering to buy it outright and make it over into a
luxury hotel with a golf course?”

“Good heavens, no. He only ever asked about
the Coffer and his ancestor Tormod.”

Thomson whipped out a pen and began taking
notes on the back of the folder.

“He only ever asked you,” said Alasdair, to
which Diana could only nod. “He asked about his father’s dirk as
well, did he?”

“No.” This time Diana annotated her negative
with a shake of her head that set her blonde locks dancing. “No one
knew about that until Greg was murdered with it.”

Alasdair turned to Colin. “You were telling
us you were at the lighthouse at the time of Greg’s murder. Why
were you lying?”

“It could be Kenneth lying,” said Diana.

Alasdair shot her a withering look and she
shrank back. Jean pushed the milk and sugar toward her.

“Colin?” asked Alasdair.

The young man leaned forward, fixing Alasdair
with a gaze like unexploded ordnance. “I often stopped by the
church, thinking of this and that. Thinking of how religion’s
supposed to bring you peace and comfort, but so often brings the
opposite. I was standing there when someone in a yellow raincoat
left the garden path, looked about the headland, then walked down
to the beach.”

“He saw you?” asked Thomson.

“No, I was behind the wall.”

Alasdair asked, “Who was it?”

“Maybe Pritchard, maybe Fergie, maybe Rab. It
wasn’t Diana, I’d have recognized her walk. It didn’t matter to me,
not then.” Colin swigged his tea, but even the undamaged side of
his face remained twisted and tense. “I was thinking that the chaps
buried beneath the stones, they were comforted, so I went to
cleaning away a bit of the lichen. Then I sensed a man in a dark
green coat watching me from the garden.”

“Kenneth,” said Diana.

Colin shrugged agreement. “I didn’t know who
he was, what he wanted. But soon as I saw him, he ran back into the
garden and away.”

Alasdair nodded and Thomson wrote, both of
them registering the accuracy of Ken’s testimony, although Jean
knew there were often slips between the alibi and the lip.

“Then I heard raised voices from the beach. I
thought maybe Pritchard was harassing some poor soul of a hiker—he
never had much truck with the concept of right-of-way—so I walked
down the path . . .” His hands around his cup tightened, the bones
standing out beneath the fragile skin, and his body was racked with
a shudder.

Jean glanced up to see the proprietor’s wary
eye moving from Colin’s trembling form to Thomson’s uniformed
gravity to Alasdair’s great stone face. He set down plates of
sandwiches and backed away slowly.

Diana’s even gaze encompassed both
representatives of the law. “Colin only remembered what happened
last night, when he saw Kenneth again. I was driving him to
Portree, thinking he might feel safer talking to the authorities
there, away from Dunasheen. We stopped here for sandwiches and
drinks.”

Alasdair once again cut to the chase. “What
happened, then, Wednesday sunset, on the beach?”

“A man in a yellow raincoat,” said Colin, the
words sieved through his teeth. “A man in a red jacket. He laughed.
The other one shouted. He had a knife. There was a flash of red
sunlight, and then the knife was red, and the man in the red jacket
fell down.”

Gently Diana removed Colin’s hands from the
teacup, which was now rattling in its saucer, and held them in her
own. “It wasn’t your fault. You had nothing to do with it,” she
told him, not in the indulgent tones one would use with a child,
but matter-of-factly. In the same tone she told Alasdair, “He
blanked it out. He genuinely thought he’d spent the afternoon at
the lighthouse, as he would usually do. After a time he went on to
the village shop, heard of the murder, and was concerned about me.
He knew something was wrong, yes, but . . .”

“There’s always something wrong,” Colin
said.

A shadow and a threat in his mind
,
Jean thought, paraphrasing Tolkien.

“Colin,” asked Thomson, “do you know who
murdered Greg MacLeod?”

“I thought it was Pritchard, he’s
bloody-minded enough.”

Alasdair said, “If his alibi’s no good, then
. . .”

“It’s good,” Thomson said. “They told me at
Portree station, a dozen folk saw him at the pub that afternoon.
Took notice of him, rather, him never being known for
couthieness.”

“Ah.” Alasdair shoved the sandwiches across
the table. “The ones you bought at the shop will keep. Eat.”

Diana released Colin’s shaking hands. He
began dismembering the bread and cheese. “I’m sorry I didn’t see
who it was. It wasn’t Diana. It couldn’t have been Fergie, she’s
saying.”

“I’m not saying that because he’s my father,”
Diana added, taking a firm bite of her own sandwich. “You’ve
cleared him, I believe.”

“Then, unless . . .” Alasdair paused. Jean
knew what he was thinking—
unless Colin is giving us the
runaround. Unless Diana is lying in her pearl-like teeth.
“Unless we’ve got some other stranger hanging about, it was Rab or
Nancy killed Greg.”

Thomson tapped on the file folder. “I’ve got
the reports on the footprints and all here, sir. And something
else, as per that stranger in the village. Aye, we’re knowing now
who it was, who he is, it’s Kenneth MacLeod, but still.”

Four sets of eyes turned toward him.

“I was blethering with my Auntie Brenda as to
who Lachie’s stranger could be. You yourself, Mr. Cameron, were
saying it was perhaps a local lad who’d been working away.”

“Fergie’d been telling us about Nancy’s
brother having to leave to find work,” Jean said.

Diana nodded. “Jimmie’s done well for
himself. He’s sent Nancy and Rab gift cards and all—the telly in
the kitchen, that’s the latest. And Nancy’s earrings. My mum’s
diamonds are half the size.”

Oh.
Jean poured herself another cup of
tea, to drown her chagrin. If Diana had been wearing those
earrings, she would never have assumed they were rhinestones. What
you believed was what you got.

Alasdair turned back to Thomson. “Go on.”

“Auntie Brenda’s not heard of him in donkey’s
years. Just on principal, I asked Portree to check up on him. Turns
out Jimmie’s living in a bed-sit in Birmingham and has not got a
bean. If Nancy was not sending him money, he’d be living on the
dole. Neither she nor Rab has any other family, Auntie’s saying.”
He tapped the pen on the file folder. “If they’re not getting their
money from Jimmie, well then, where’s it coming from?”

Jean stopped stirring her tea. She saw a
family walk in the door and take off their coats. She heard a car
horn honk briefly, in greeting rather than anger, and a sheep baa.
She saw Alasdair’s lips tighten in a thin smile.
Aha!
“Fergie was telling us, Diana, that there’s nothing gone missing
from the house. So far as he knows.”

“So far as either of us knows, yes. Only God
knows what’s been stored in lumber rooms and dark corners. We can’t
make a proper inventory and keep the place running at the same
time.”

“You were saying you suspected Pritchard of
cooking the books or making off with the odd item. What of the
Finlays, either with or without Pritchard’s collusion?”

Her features went from puzzled to indignant,
but not, Jean thought, at Alasdair’s question. “Father trusts them.
He’s known them since he was a boy. They’ve lived at Dunasheen all
their lives, working for my great-uncle, then for us. Pritchard was
bitter about that, come to think of it, said more than once that
Father trusted them over him. He must have suspected
something.”

“What I’m suspecting,” said Alasdair, “is
that it’s no matter of God knowing what’s in the attics and all,
when Rab and Nancy know. And they’re likely knowing whose dirk was
hanging in the hall as well.”

“When Greg booked his and Tina’s holiday,”
said Jean, “one or the other of the Finlays contacted him, claiming
to be Dunasheen’s manager and offering him the dirk. Thinking they
were speaking for Fergie, Greg told them the dirk was all well and
good, but he was also looking the place over for a golf course or
resort or whatever. And then Fergie started talking about a big
sale. He meant the Coffer, but . . .”

Diana arranged knife, fork, and spoon like
bars on a graph. “The Finlays have had their opinions on our plans.
They’re entitled to those.”

“If Dunasheen was sold, refitted, repurposed
further than it already has been, would they be entitled to stay
on?” asked Colin.

“Greg would want a younger, hipper staff,”
Jean pointed out. “One that didn’t grouse about paying guests.”

“And even if the Finlays weren’t sent packing
by a new owner,” said Alasdair, “that new owner’d be making proper
inventories and clearing out the lumber rooms. No more nicking the
odd item and selling it on. I reckon Rab and Nancy have been doing
that for a good many years.”

Diana was looking less like a blushing rose
and more like the Snow Queen.

Thomson added, “Nancy’s by way of taking
things as they come, but Rab, no, he’s fussed. He was in the pub
Wednesday talking about happy days with the old laird, when they
were not obliged to suck up to strangers. And the Krums sitting in
the window just then, though I’m thinking they didna understand all
he was saying.”